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What piqued this week…

Not a lot of time to dish this week, what with Satan’s Flu™ occupying my person, and Mercury entering my Fifth Equinox (which I hate!) so I thought I’d bust out a few of this week’s most interesting stories.

1. Medical
   Diabetes Mine, a blog covering diabetes, this week put out an open letter to Apple (aka Steve Jobs) to design a better Insulin Pump. Well actually, the call was for a competition to design a better medical aide, the winner getting the Apple design team to Pimp my Pump, as it were. Techcrunch also ran the story, with some promising traction. Medical technology is one of my favorite topics; don’t even get me started on nano-technology.
2. Business
   From Guy Kawasaki, who discovered the MBA in a page, a veritable cheat sheet of MBA business theories that one might imagine perfect for the David Brents of the world (or the Michael Scotts, depending on your preference). For mine, this would serve as an excellent meeting-bingo sheet, although conspicuous only by its absence is “synergize”. Hmmm, at the end of the day, moving forward, we’ll reconnect on that at a later date.
3. Online Tabloid
   Also from Guy Kawasaki, Truemors was launched a month ago to a chorus of criticism from the blogosphere, many citing that the User-Generated Rumours site was not only destined to fail but would also hurt Mr K’s reputation. (For those that don’t know, Guy was an original Apple employee and is now a Silicon Valley investor). However, I get the feeling there’s something behind this model that will work, because to my knowledge there hasn’t been a decent example of tabloid media (oxymoron?) moving to an online format, perhaps with the exception of Myspace. One can only imagine that Rupert Murdoch might see fit to acquire it in due course.
4. Second Life Dying, or art imitating life?
   “Second Life is like a giant porno. All people do there is have sex,” says Baris Karadogan (ComVentures). Interesting take, Baris, and I’m sure a lot of people would agree with you, but let’s not jump ahead of ourselves (for they said the same thing about the interweb once!). Enter Sony, looking to introduce their own virtual world attached to the PS3, who have even stated that their virtual world will be policed and that violators will be dealt with swiftly. I’m off now to build my virtual cat-o-nine tails and digital public stocks. You guys work up some rotten tomatoes and we’ll bleed the freaks!
5. Time Travel
   You know that excitable guy/girl who used to always go on about how one day we’ll invent time travel, and you’d always ask them if that were the case why aren’t we coming back to visit ourselves from the future? And then after a moment of sulking they’d counter with Time Police? (which is irrelevant to this point, but I just wanted to paint an accurate picture). Well it turns out they COULD BE RIGHT! Not about the time police, but according to Amos Ori (Israel’s Doc Brown) we would first need to the technology to build the receiving stations as it were, that would allow future generations past that “wrap” back around to the past point.

– Ben Prendergast